Navegando en tres siglos de historia socioeconómica marítima con ayuda de la Inteligencia Artificial: el proyecto Flotas de la Nueva España

Abstract

The New Spain Fleets Project is an interdisciplinary initiative that aims to develop and utilise Artificial Intelligence tools to analyse three centuries of maritime socio-economic history based on documents from the 16th to the 18th centuries. The fleets constituted the main system of connection between Spain and America, generating a vast amount of administrative documentation now preserved in historical archives. Although many of these documents have been digitised, access to them remains limited due to the complexity of the old handwriting and the massive volume of information.

The project addresses this problem by developing models for the automatic classification of handwriting and handwritten text recognition (HTR), capable of transcribing historical documents with high levels of accuracy. Using a carefully annotated corpus, we have trained specialised models for different types of handwriting, achieving error rates of less than 10%. We also emphasise the importance of the quality of digitised images in improving results.

Among the next steps, we highlight the automated correction of transcriptions using language models and information retrieval techniques, as well as the semantic annotation of texts to enable large-scale analysis of historical information. Ultimately, the project aims to democratise access to historical sources and open up new possibilities for research in the digital humanities.